Pollstar co-founder dies. The Fresno native kept pioneering music publication local

Gary Smith was a stalwart of the concert industry — the kind of guy who could be seen posed up in photos with icons like Elton John, a pre-”Eras” era Taylor Swift or hair-rock band Poison.

A kid from Fresno, Smith worked his way into the promotions game in the late 1960s by hustling handbills for free tickets and was quickly helping bring bring bands like The Doors and The Guess Who to the central San Joaquin Valley.

In 1981, along with Gary Bongiovanni, Smith started the trade publication Promoters Online Listings, or Pollstar. It become a pioneering product and a Bible for those in the music business.

Smith died Saturday at his home in Fresno. He was 77.

“Although Gary’s passing was sudden and unexpected, he lived a life full of excitement, joy, and love,” Smith’s family told The Bee on Monday.

“He will be missed, but never forgotten.”

From Papa Productions to Pollstar

Though technically retired in 2019, Smith still worked as a consultant and was very much the face of Pollstar, attending events like the annual Concert Industry Consortium.

“Anybody who’s anybody in the music industry knows Gary Smith,” says Robert Allen, a longtime friend who met Smith while working a concert at Sacramento’s Memorial Auditorium in his 20s.

For a time, the two were roommates while Allen worked at Papa Productions, the concert promotion company Smith ran in Fresno. “I was a workaholic, like he was,” Allen says.

He remembers working with bands like Aerosmith, The Guess Who, Average White Band and Electric Light Orchestra.

This was before Ticketmaster and Live Nation had their monopoly and small, independent promoters worked the various regions of the state.

“Avalon ran L.A. — Papa Productions ran the Central Valley,” Allen says.

“And Bill Graham ran the coast.”

Smith cut his teeth in in San Diego and Los Angeles, and spent time on the road, as a tour manager with Average White Band, but he was born and raised in Fresno. He played basketball at McLane High School and earned a scholarship to Fresno State.

It was Fresno where he returned and chose to stay. It’s where he married wife Eileen Anderson-Smith and set out to raise his sons James Dean Earl Smith and Spencer Aaron Scott Smith in the Vincent Home, a 100-plus-year-old Victorian on San Pablo Avenue.

Fresno’s best kept secret

Fresno is also where Pollstar thrived.

The company revolutionized the concerts industry by tracking box-office receipts to share with others in the industry. Before Pollstar, venue operators and promoters had to take managers at their word about a band’s draw with fans.

It was often overstated.

“The magazine got the actual receipts,” Allen says. The data was collected and computerized (almost unheard of in the early 1980s) then printed and mailed out each week. The company beat competitors like Billboard Magazine by being quick to adapt to new technologies.

It was using a dial-up network for electronic publishing in 1984.

By 1994, Pollstar was online.

“Pollstar has always been like Fresno’s best-kept secret,” says Debbie Speer, who was hired by Smith in 1997 and still works as the publication’s features editor.

During her interview for the job, Speer discovered that Smith was behind the very first concert she attended without a chaperon; and a few others she may have sneaked into after that.

“He wasn’t my boss,” Speer says.

“He was my cool uncle. Or maybe cool big brother.”

For decades before it was sold to the Oak View Group in 2017, Pollstar’s headquarters sat in a nondescript office park just off Shaw Avenue and Highway 99 and provided solid day jobs for any number of musician types. Over the years, that included Fulton 55 general manager Tony Martin, blues singer John Clifton, Mark Michel, who played bass in the ska band Let’s Go Bowling, and Bradley “Dudeboy” Rogers.

“The joke is if it wasn’t for Pollstar, half these people wouldn’t have jobs,” Smith told The Bee in an interview in 2013.

Smith is survived by his ex-wife Anderson-Smith and their two sons; sister-in law Linda Rosemary Wray-Smith and a long list of cousins, nieces and great nieces and nephews. His son Spencer followed him into the music industry and works as an audio engineer and has toured with Jaden Smith and Justin Bieber. The other, James, is an artist who works tech support for Apple.

Services are pending.